Shirley Temple: A Child and Beacon of the Great Depression

ENLARGE

Shirley Temple in 'Little Miss Marker' (1934).
AP

By

Will Friedwald

Feb. 12, 2014 5:18 p.m. ET

In 2014, the term "movie magic" generally means millions of dollars in digital effects, all delivered in the cause of watching two giant robots bash each other over the head. In 1934, movie magic meant a 5-year-old, 3-foot-tall white girl dancing with a middle-age black man dressed like a domestic servant. Somehow, they defy time and place in a way that seems infinitely more magical than anything that the technical wizards of contemporary cinema have delivered. In 2014, the image of a million android vampire hobbits sprouting wings seems boring and pedestrian, but three minutes of Shirley Temple, who died on Monday at the age of 85, merely walking up stairs is so amazing that you want to want to watch it over and over, your eyes not quite believing what they're seeing.

The most obvious thing to remember Shirley Temple for—a point so overwhelming that it barely needs to be stated—is that she was the greatest child star in the history of not just the movies but all of popular culture. No other youngster so dominated the box office and no other individual, other than Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, did more to deliver both Republicans and Democrats alike from the Great Depression.

But what isn't said often enough about Shirley Temple Black is that when you compare her to the many dancing ladies in the movies who couldn't really sing (Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse) and those terrific singers in films who danced merely passably (Judy Garland, Doris Day), Temple emerges as the major female triple-threat of her era and since. She was a singer of uncommon ability, capable of putting a song over with the best of them in an age when the competition was Al Jolson and Bing Crosby; a dancer worthy of comparison with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and even her longtime costar, the great African-American tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson; and an actress who could break your heart just by looking at you.

Temple's career as an entertainer was reaching its peak roughly 75 years ago, yet she's hardly some obscure, forgotten figure stashed away in the cultural attic. By World War II, a whole generation had grown up with her, yet Temple's movies mean just as much to the baby boomers and even Generation X. Her performances have been available in every medium from vinyl LPs to VHS tapes to DVDs and are now proliferating on YouTube; they've been colorized, reprocessed for stereo and are undoubtedly next on the list to be converted into digital 3-D—not that any such enhancements are remotely necessary.

When Temple titled her 1988 autobiography "Child Star," she was selling herself short. She was no more an ordinary child than Mickey Mouse was an actual rodent. If you wanted to see little kids acting like real little kids, you went to see "Our Gang" (aka "Little Rascals"); Temple was something else entirely. No kid could compete with her.

Temple almost always did her best dancing in the company of adult males—most famously Robinson (in four films), but also Buddy Ebsen ("Captain January"), Jack Haley ("Poor Little Rich Girl" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"), George Murphy ("Little Miss Broadway")—and even they could barely keep up. Bojangles and Shirley were something no less magical than Fred and Ginger and yet something else entirely; the only experience comparable is Gene Kelly dancing with an animated mouse in "Anchors Aweigh," a great dancer partnering with a supremely musical entity that is at once superhuman and supernatural.

Her solo numbers are no less transcendent. When I think of "On the Good Ship Lollipop," somehow I see Temple dancing with cartoon, anthropomorphic lollipops on a vintage clipper ship. It's always a shock to be reminded that none of that is actually in the scene—she's not even on a ship—but she creates those images in our mind's eye. The same thing with all the dancing undersea denizens, those tuna fish "trucking left and right," in "At the Codfish Ball." Temple is such a powerful interpreter—she's not only Eleanor Powell but also Ethel Merman or Mary Martin—that she makes us see them and believe them even though they're not actually on screen.

In the 1936 film "Captain January" she even sings the famous sextet from "Lucia di Lammermor"—here reduced to a trio with those adorable curmudgeons Slim Summerville and Guy Kibbee. And even though the three sing the whole thing as "la-la-la" (instead of in proper Italian), the art of opera becomes immediately more entertaining and intimate than when any proper soprano ever sang it.

In one sense, Temple is never entirely alone when she's singing and dancing; in "Early Bird," the opening number from "Captain January," she sings directly to the viewer-listener, and she is so engaging you almost feel like you're in the middle of a duet with Temple, she's singing straight to you and almost literally dancing with you—she's pure 3-D even without the glasses.

Temple's moment was brief: roughly 20 classic features from 1934 to 1940. She was like Mary Poppins, an enchanted sprite who lingered with us only until the wind changed. Her career was essentially over by the early 1940s not because audiences wouldn't accept a teenage or an adult Temple, but because her artistry belonged to the years of the Depression, not to the wartime and the postwar eras. She was not only the stuff that dreams are made of but hopes, aspirations, fantasies, the eternal spirit of mankind—all somehow crystallized in the form of a dimpled little curly topped moppet.

FINALLY..a tribute column which articulates PERFECTLY the awesomeness that was young Shirley Temple! I am one of the premier Our Gang memorabilia collectors in the world, yet I totally agree with this author's keen observation here:

"When Temple titled her 1988 autobiography "Child Star," she was selling herself short. She was no more an ordinary child than Mickey Mouse was an actual rodent. If you wanted to see little kids acting like real little kids, you went to see "Our Gang" (aka "Little Rascals"); Temple was something else entirely. No kid could compete with her." ...Then again, nor could any adult. She was that magical!

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